We can finally find out just how warm it is inside Uranus – no probe needed
It's big.
Ever wondered what it’s like deep inside Uranus?
How big is it? Is it warm? And how long does it take to reach the bottom?
Well, a stunning new stimulation – sorry, simulation – on YouTube transports you to the depths of Uranus from the comfort of your own home.
No probe needed.
Okay, that’s enough. Uranus is stunning, it deserves to be more than just the butt of our jokes.
The video, posted by Stargaze, has been viewed almost 600,000 times, and offers a truly mesmerising look into the distant planet.
It was 4.5 billion years ago when gravity pulled nearby swirling gas and dust together to form this blue-green planet. This means it doesn’t have a true surface, and we can indeed journey deep inside.
So, what would it would be like?
At first, Uranus’s rings – which are vertical, giving it the nickname of the bulls-eye planet – would be too fine to see. Nasa says this is because they are darker than charcoal and very close to the planet.
Entering the atmosphere, clouds would engulf you in a layer of hydrogen, helium and frozen methane. The methane gas and crystals gives the planet its colour, as the Sun reflects from the planet’s cloud tops.
It’s cold inside Uranus. The temperature is around -224C, the coldest atmosphere of all the planets in the solar system.
Passing through, you’d hear lightning rumbling beneath you. The pressure would rapidly increase to around 25 atmospheres – 25 times the air pressure on Earth at sea level.
Approaching the mantle, the wind speeds reach almost 600mph. The fastest wind ever recorded on Earth hit 253mph.
The mantle is made up of a hot, dense fluid ocean of icy materials like water, methane and ammonia.
But it’s not just liquid. As you fall through the middle layer of the planet, you will be pummelled with diamonds as individual carbon atoms glue onto each other.
But while the video says it would take a few weeks to fall through the planet before hitting the core, Jake Foster, an astronomer at Royal Observatory Greenwich, disagrees.
He says it would only take around 40 minutes to fall through the atmosphere, where ‘waiting for you will be a hard rocky core, which you will smash into at around 50,000 mph’. Ouch.
‘Of course, the denser fluids making up the planet’s mantle will slow anyone down considerably,’ he adds.
‘Despite being discovered over 200 years ago, so much about Uranus remains a mystery to us, partly due to its vast distance away from the Earth.’
‘With that in mind, there are still a few things we now know with confidence. Uranus has a mass of just under 87 septillion kilograms, making it 14.5 times heavier than the Earth, and is large enough to fit 63 Earths inside.
‘Its density is only slightly higher than that of water, making it the second least dense planet in the solar system.’
So there you have it. Uranus is massive, but not very dense, because it has a lot of gas in it.
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